354
GEORGE MOORE AND JOHN FREEMAN
would add a sickly page of homilies. Even the genius of Wordsworth could not redeem him from the curse of morality. You remember his Leech-gatherer? Had we to choose between The Leech-gatherer and the fisherman, we should choose the earlier story, with regret, perhaps, but we should choose it. Wordsworth we read in his own metre; Theocritus we read in a translation in which much must be lost; yet how much remains in the most beautiful translation ever made! You were saying?
Freeman: I was going to remind you of a story in verse by George Eliot of a girl who loved a king, and who for the king's sake refused to marry her lover; but the king, hearing of her broken faith, sent for her and kept her in his court till she began to perceive that he was only a man like another—
Moore: And robbed of her illusions, she returned to her betrothed; and with him George Eliot leaves the girl, satisfied that she has acquiesced in all the prejudices and conventions of her time, that she has paid homage to them. Of Nature there is not a trace, poor, outcast Nature!
Freeman: You don't think that the intimacy of the king would have checked the girl's admiration of him and turned it back to its source, the young man that she had discarded?
Moore: No, indeed, I do not think so, not unless the king had possessed himself of the girl's affections and wearied of them; then of course, she might have picked up the thread she had dropped.
Freeman: Is not your view very cynical?
Moore: That is how you like to take it—do you prefer truth or lies? Ah, here is Mabel bringing in the tea; you'll stay and have a cup with me, won't you?
II
Moore: You will have another cup?
Freeman: No, thank you.
Moore: A cigar?
Freeman: No, thank you; I don't smoke.
Moore: Not even a cigarette?
Freeman: No, thank you.
Moore: So you like Mr Hardy's poems better than his novels?
Freeman: Yes; I think he writes verse better than prose, occasionally somewhat awkwardly; but in both, in verse and prose,
